Dan Wittenberg bought about 13 acres of land in the Potomac River flood zone in St. Mary’s County because of his love of sailing and windsurfing. Eight years ago, with no special real estate or construction skills, Wittenberg built an 800-square-foot cottage there (the maximum permissible on that 566,000 square foot lot). Now he’s chronicling his attempt to build something special that will pass regulators’ muster on a just-purchased one-third of an acre waterfront parcel next door. This is his 10th installment.
A lot can happen in a month. And that’s not just a bad pun in a column about developing a vacant piece of waterfront real estate.
Since October’s lack-of-progress report I now have a cozy cottage overlooking my lot’s newly sandy beach. Sturdily built of brick and block and comfortably dimensioned at 33 feet long, 26 feet wide and 14 feet high, it has direct southern exposure as well as a panoramic, sea-level view of the shimmering Potomac through a wall of windows running its entire length.
It’s pretty much everything I wanted to build on the site and it was way under budget, too. But this attractive single story isn’t the story of nearly instantaneous, low-cost construction coupled with a suddenly enlightened and expeditious regulatory bureaucracy. No, this happy “development” is a tale of just about the opposite.
After last month’s installment, I got a call from the scion of the family who owns the properties surrounding mine and whose name even graces the subdivision plat. His family first landed in St. Mary’s County on the Maryland mother-ships “Ark” and “Dove” in 1634 so it’s no surprise that the offspring are still “landed” in the county today. This particular descendant was inquiring whether I’d be interested in buying the adjoining (and charming) little cottage from his father’s estate.
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The recently deceased patriarch had been stubbornly waging a decade-long Cold War with “city hall” over the rebuilding of that cottage since Hurricane Isabel leveled the neighborhood bearing his name in 2003. While taking a principled stand on behalf of the still-intact vacation home by refusing to comply with several relatively benign county mandated “fixes” (things like switching from fuses to circuit breakers), he carelessly allowed its grandfathered septic rights to lapse through three consecutive years of “non-occupancy.” Unbeknownst to him, that was the regulatory kiss of death but he disbelievingly fought it right up until his own demise this year.
His heirs, not wanting to make it a dynastic struggle and frustrated by the myriad regulations continually raising the bar (not to mention the base flood elevation) for any floodplain construction, decided to sell the grandfathered property that their grandfather (and father) had actually built. With no realistic possibility of ever again obtaining a “certificate of occupancy” for the dwelling, they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse: $25,000 for the 700-square-foot cottage and its 7,000-square-foot lot which includes 40 feet of wooden seawall protected waterfront.
In purchasing this cottage-next-door, however, I didn’t actually buy a “house” — just four useable walls and a roof that are already standing within the Critical Area’s floodplain. For the same reasons that so perplexed its sellers, this property cannot be a “dwelling” for me either, but only a commodious structure (though one without a commode due to those lost septic privileges) for recreational and/or storage purposes. In other words, a great enclosed space from which to enjoy playing with water toys – my goal all along.
My first order of business will be to apply for a perc test from the St. Mary’s County Health Department. This land cannot possibly pass that $215 exam but its official “does not perc” failure will trigger the county’s Department of Land Use And Growth Management to formally deem the lot “non-buildable” which, in turn, will then allow the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation (the county’s tax assessor) to adjust the property’s valuation from its current $248,300 down to $25,000. That translates into a property tax savings of about $3,000 per year.
The previous owner was so adamantly in denial about the revocation of his cottage’s septic rights (and hence value) that he refused to have a perc test done and thus continued paying property taxes on the place as if it were still a buildable parcel. Maintaining the unfortunate fiction cost him roughly an additional $27,000 in property taxes. I’ll have to file my appeal of that wrong-by-orders-of- magnitude assessment before the year’s end in order to avoid paying 2015 property taxes on that inflated basis as well.
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Adding further insult to the seller’s long list of self-inflicted injuries, the clerk’s office for the St. Mary’s County Circuit Court (that’s the County Clerk) also wanted to collect recording and transfer taxes on our sale based on the bloated assessment value rather than the actual purchase price. That would have meant an additional $5,137 in closing costs to be split equally between us. Fortunately, the settlement attorney discovered that an affidavit signed by both parties attesting to the property’s “disparagement” would suffice to avoid such a parting gift from the county to someone who’d already overpaid their property taxes by a factor of 10 for about 10 years.
Share this articleShare“Disparaged” really is the appropriate adjective for the situation. Even if hubris may have been a contributing factor, it’s still hard not to feel sympathy for anyone who builds (and rebuilds) his own dream cottage through 60 years of storms only to watch it ultimately succumb to red tape when its unrecoverable sewage privileges ran , er, “afoul” of a bureaucratic deadline on inaction. It seems to me that the property was disparaged by a far more impersonal and unforgiving force than a hurricane — an efficient civil service working strictly “by-the-book.”
My next step will be cleaning up the decades of accumulated family heirlooms (read “junk”) residing within those walls. That means a crowbar and a dumpster. Thereafter, a little cosmetic touching up – but never more than half the structure’s worth since that threshold is the benchmark for compliance with current floodplain elevation rules — the expensive regulatory purgatory I hopefully bought my way out of with this purchase.
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Only time (usually not an ally of coastal real estate) will tell whether my decision to “double down” was a good one. But stay tuned — it’s not the ending of this story (trick or otherwise), only an unanticipated plot twist. This is still very much a work in progress and I’ll need plenty more crowd-sourced input.
Read Dan Wittenberg’s previous columns:
Temporary setback stalls Potomac coast project
To build something great at the shore, you’ve got to destroy something first
Removal of concrete to make way for proposed floatable structure at shoreline
Getting permit to repair shoreline is first step in building in flood zone
To get a permit for Potomac project, you must first understand the process
Creating a living shoreline is key to Potomac project
Passing muster on septic is first step in winning approval for flood zone project
Pontoon house? Stilt house? Geodesic dome? ISO ideas to develop flood zone.
The quest to build something very cool in a very hazardous area
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